Sand Francisco Examiner: Gallery Watch
Friday. February 28 1997
David Bonetti

In "Critical Apparel," Refusalon, 20 Hawthorne St., is featuring, through Saturday, three artists who make works that use clothing or fibers as their basis.

The most successful new work in the show is former San Franciscan (present-day Angeleno) Didi Dunphy's "Modernist Samplers." Following up her earlier work critiquing mid-century modernism, i.e., abstract painting, in which she redid Kenneth Noland stripe paintings as awnings, Morris Louis stain paintings as tie-dyes and even Barnett Newman "zips" as monochromes divided with real zippers, Dunphy is now taking on the entire modernist canon in the form of miniature embroideries.

There is lots going on in these little works. The macho-scale paintings of Frank Stella, Al Held and Gene Davis are recast as domestic-scale miniatures, while the arguably masculine medium of oil painting is replaced with the feminine medium of embroidery. (To show the inadequacy of such schema, Dunphy includes an Agnes Martin among her appropriations.)

These are delightful little pieces, and Dunphy once again demonstrates that feministic critique can have a dry and wicked sense of humor.